The Burglar in the Rye

by Lawrence Block

  “You’re a collector,” I said. “When Landau was killed and I was arrested, you came straight to my shop. You as much as told me you’d buy the letters, even if they were stolen, even if I’d killed to get them. I didn’t have the sense that you’d never made that kind of offer before.”

  “You’ve no proof for any of this.”

  “I don’t suppose it would be hard to find,” I said. “Kassenmeier probably stayed at a hotel in Seattle, and it wouldn’t be hard to find out which one. If she made any telephone calls, there’ll be a record. If she met a pudgy fellow with Brillo hair and a face like a bulldog—”

  “I beg your pardon!”

  “Make that a heavyset gentleman,” I said smoothly, “with curly hair and an assertive jawline. If she met a fine-looking fellow like that, in the hotel lobby or at the coffee shop or in a bar in the neighborhood, somebody’s sure to remember. But why fight it? Nobody’s asking you to cop to conspiracy. You just let her know how important the letters were to you, and where they might be found.”

  “There’s nothing illegal about that.”

  “Certainly not. And maybe you advanced her some money for expenses.”

  He thought about it. “That sounds as though it might be illegal,” he said, “so I’m sure I did nothing of the sort. And if anybody did give her expense money, I’m sure it must have been cash, so there’d be no record of it.”

  “So she came to New York,” I went on, “and she took a room here in the Paddington. But here’s a curious thing. After she turned up dead, the police checked to see if she was registered here. And she wasn’t.”

  “What’s so curious about that?” Lester Eddington wondered. “It may be difficult to use a false name on an airplane, but how hard is it at a hotel?”

  “Not that hard,” Isis said. “Bernie did it, even if he did have a little trouble keeping it straight.”

  I brightened. We were back to first names!

  “It’s a nuisance,” I said. “Unless you have a fake credit card to match your fake name, you have to pay cash and leave deposits. She still might have done that, just to keep her name away from the scene of the crime she was planning, but we know she didn’t.”

  “How do we know that?”

  “We know what room she occupied,” I said. “Ray?”

  “Actin’ on information received,” that worthy announced, “I made a check of the hotel records concernin’ recent registrations in the room in question. The room was on the hotel’s books as unoccupied for the entire past week.”

  “Wait a minute,” Isis said. “If there was no record, how did you happen to know what room she was in?”

  “Information received,” Ray said.

  “Received from whom?”

  “From me,” I said.

  “And how did you happen to stumble on the information?”

  “I happened to be in that room, and—”

  “You happened to be in it.”

  “Twice,” I said. “The first time I didn’t know whose room it was, and I didn’t really care. I was on my way from the fire escape to the hall, and all I wanted was to get out of the building altogether, because I’d just come from Anthea Landau’s apartment.”

  “That’s the dame who got killed,” the uniformed cop said. “You were in her apartment?”

  “That’s right, and—”

  “Am I missing something?” He turned to Ray. “Why isn’t he in a cell?”

  “He’s out on bail,” Ray said.

  “He’s out on bail and he’s putting on a show for us?” Ray gave him a look, and he shrugged. “Hey,” he said, “I just asked. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  The room went quiet, and I let it stay that way for a moment. Then I said, “There was something I noticed in that room on my first pass through it. As a matter of fact, I found something in that room on my first visit, and, uh, I took it along with me.”

  “Ray,” the uniformed cop said, “did you happen to read this guy his rights? Because he just admitted to a Class D felony.” Ray gave him another look, and he opened his mouth and closed it.

  “It was a piece of jewelry,” I said, and glanced at Isis, who registered this information and nodded thoughtfully. “I subsequently found out that it had been the property of one of the hotel’s permanent residents, and that she didn’t live in the room I’d taken it from. Someone had evidently stolen it from her and put it in the room where I found it.”

  “That’s interesting,” Hilliard Moffett said, “if a bit hard to follow. But what does it have to do with two murders and the disappearance of the Fairborn-Landau correspondence?”

  “I’ll get to that.”

  “Well, I wish you’d speed it up,” he said, a little testily. “And could someone open a window? Between the body heat and the fireplace, it’s getting awfully warm in here.”

  I looked at Isis, and she turned to Marty, and he walked over to the window and opened it.

  “What I did,” I said, “was put two and two together, which is to say I put 602 and 303 together. The room numbers,” I explained, when I saw some puzzled faces. “Landau was in 602, and someone entered her room and killed her, and made off with the letters from Fairborn. And 303 was the room where Karen Kassenmeier was living, and where I found the stolen jewelry. Of course I didn’t know the jewelry was stolen when I, uh, picked it up, and I didn’t know it was Kassenmeier’s room until I went back to it a second time.”

  “You went back to it…”

  “To find out whose room it was. I figured there had to be a connection between the theft and homicide on the sixth floor and the missing jewels that turned up three floors below. Anyway, I went there and found a suitcase in the closet with Karen Kassenmeier’s luggage tag on it. I might have found more, but I heard somebody at the door.”

  “Kassenmeier?”

  “That’s what I assumed,” I said. “I didn’t know her name yet, I hadn’t had time to read the luggage tag, but I assumed the person at the door was the room’s current occupant. It was the middle of the night, so it didn’t figure to be a friend paying a call.”

  “It could have been another burglar,” Isis suggested. “Like you.”

  “Not like me,” I said, “because this burglar had a key. What I did was hide.”

  “In the closet?”

  I looked at Alice, whose question it was, and who seemed surprised at having raised it. “Not the closet,” I said. “And a good thing, because I have a feeling they looked in the closet.”

  “‘They’?”

  I nodded at Isis. “There were two of them,” I said. “A man and a woman. I was in the bathroom, behind the shower curtain, and I didn’t get a look at either of them. I stayed where I was, and they used the bedroom and left.”

  “They used the bedroom?” Erica said. “How?”

  “Well, not to sleep.”

  “They had sex in it,” Carolyn said. “Right, Bern?”

  “They did,” I said, “and then they left.”

  “Kassenmeier and some guy,” Ray Kirschmann said, and glanced at Carolyn. “Or maybe it wasn’t a guy.”

  “It was,” I said.

  “What did you do, hear his voice?”

  I shook my head. “He left the toilet seat up,” I said.

  “The pig,” Isis said.

  “I never really heard his voice,” I went on, “except in an undertone, and I certainly didn’t recognize it. But I recognized her voice, and it wasn’t Kassenmeier’s.”

  “How could you tell? You said you never met Kassenmeier.”

  “I never did,” I said, “so if I recognized this voice—”

  “Then you knew who the person was,” Marty said. “The woman.”

  “Yes. She was the person who got me interested in Anthea Landau and her file folder full of letters. And now she turned up in a room where I’d found some stolen jewelry, and then she left and I checked the luggage tag and read the name Karen Kassenmeier. So my first thought was that this was her room,
and that she and Kassenmeier were the same person, even if I had met her under another name. One of the names was an alias, and they were both the same person.”

  “Maybe you were right,” Alice Cottrell said levelly. “How can you be sure they weren’t the same person?”

  Because Karen Kassenmeier’s dead, I thought, and you’re sitting here trying to look innocent. But what I said was, “I saw Karen Kassenmeier at the morgue, and she wasn’t anyone I’d seen before. But even before then, I had the feeling the woman I overheard wasn’t the same person whose room it was.”

  Ray said, “Why’s that, Bern?”

  “The bed was made.” That put a puzzled look on every face in the room, so I explained. “The two visitors made love in Room 303, and then they left, and when I saw the bed it had been made up.”

  The man from Sotheby’s, Victor Harkness, cleared his throat. “All that would seem to establish,” he said, “is that they’re neat.”

  “I couldn’t see how they’d had time to make the bed,” I said, “and it was very professionally made, as if the chambermaid had done it. In fact it looked the same as it had looked before they got there, and there was a reason for it. They’d never unmade the bed in the first place.”

  “You mean they…”

  “Had sex on top of the bedspread,” Isis Gauthier finished for him, and made a face. “That’s even worse than leaving the toilet seat up.”

  “I suppose they were in a hurry,” I said, “and they probably wanted to avoid leaving evidence of their visit to the room, evidence Karen Kassenmeier might notice when she returned to it. But they did leave some evidence, and it enabled me to determine who the man was.”

  “DNA,” the uniformed cop said. “But how would you get samples for comparison, and when did you have time to run tests, and—”

  “Not DNA,” I said, “and that wasn’t the kind of evidence that was left behind. Maybe they practiced safe sex.”

  “I hope so,” Isis said. “Everybody ought to.”

  “Who was the man?” Carolyn asked. “And what was the evidence that pointed to him?”

  “It was a black mark.”

  “On his record?” Victor Harkness suggested. “A blot on his copybook?”

  “Don’t forget his escutcheon,” I said. “But this was a black mark on the bedspread. At the top, over the pillow. Right where his head would be.” While they thought about it, I added, “Remember what I said earlier, about hearing a key in the lock? That was one of the reasons I assumed it was the room’s occupant coming home. But it wasn’t, yet it was somebody with a key. Of the two people in that room, I knew the woman, and I couldn’t think of any reason she would have a key to another person’s hotel room. But maybe the man had access to a key. A key to Room 303, say, or a master key, a key that would open any room in the hotel.”

  “A key to the door,” Carolyn said, “and a black mark on the bedspread.”

  “A picture begins to emerge,” I said. “A picture of a hotel employee. Someone who could put Karen Kassenmeier in a room without officially registering her. Someone who would thus know what room she was in, and would be able to get in and out with no trouble. Someone whose hair is as black as the telltale mark on the bedspread, and not because that’s the way Mother Nature made it. Carl, you’ve been at the Paddington for years. Is there anyone you know of who fits that description?”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-one

  Everyone looked at Carl Pillsbury, and I have to hand it to him—he was as cool and as bold as a brass cucumber. He frowned in thought, took his chin between his thumb and forefinger, pursed his lips, and emitted a soundless whistle. “Someone who works for the Paddington and dyes his hair,” he said. “Now a couple of years ago we had a fellow who wore a toupee, but that’s not the same thing, is it? But I can’t think of anyone who uses hair coloring.”

  “Then somebody musta turned you upside down,” Ray said, “an’ stuck your head in the inkwell, ’cause that mop of yours looks about as natural as Astroturf.”

  “Me?” he said, his eyes widening. “You actually think I color my hair?”

  “Everybody knows you do, Carl,” Isis said.

  “Everybody?”

  “Everybody in the tristate area.”

  “It’s obvious?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I have a pretty good idea what happened,” I said, “although there are a few gaps here and there. I know you’re from the Midwest originally, and so was Karen Kassenmeier. The two of you aren’t that far apart in age. I think you knew each other way back when, or else you met here in New York.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I suppose it’s possible she approached you cold when she got here,” I said, “but that’s hard to believe. She must have known you.”

  “That would explain something,” Hilliard Moffett said. “I certainly never suggested anything criminal when I met that woman in Seattle—”

  “Whether you did or not,” Ray assured him, “we got bigger fish to fry. An’ whatever you did you did in Seattle, an’ this here’s New York, an’ I don’t see no Seattle cops in this room. So just say whatever you got to say.”

  “All right,” Moffett said, and stuck out his jaw. “She had an interesting reaction when I mentioned the name of the hotel. Until then she’d seemed noncommittal, lukewarm to the whole notion, but then she brightened. ‘The Paddington,’ she said. ‘I wonder if he’s still there.’ I asked her what she meant, and she just shook her head and pressed me for more details.”

  “That proves nothing,” Carl said. “She once knew someone who once worked or lived at the hotel. So what?”

  “You’d be surprised what good police work can turn up,” Ray said. “Once we take a good long look at both your backgrounds, don’t you think we’re gonna find somethin’ puts you an’ her in the same place at the same time? You could cop to it right now an’ save everybody some trouble.”

  “Even if I knew her once,” he said, “it still proves nothing.”

  “Here’s what I think happened,” I said. “She showed up at the hotel and told you she wanted to check in under a false name. You had an even better idea: she wouldn’t register at all, and you’d stick her in a room. That would save her upwards of a hundred and fifty dollars a night.”

  “What makes you think I would do anything like that?”

  “It’s not exactly unheard-of in the business,” I said. “It’s a good way for a desk clerk to make a few dollars for himself. Like a bartender forgetting to charge for drinks, with the understanding that the customer will show his appreciation with an oversize tip. But Karen Kassenmeier was offering you more than the chance to knock down a few dollars on an off-the-books rental, wasn’t she? She could afford to, because you could provide more than a place to stay. You could get her into Anthea Landau’s room.”

  “Why would she need me for that? You already said the woman was a professional thief.”

  “She was a pro at liftin’ things,” Ray said, “but there’s nothin’ on her sheet shows she ever opened a door she didn’t have the key to.”

  “You could get her in,” I said. “That had to be worth something to her. You could find a spare key to Landau’s room, or lend her your passkey. And you could tip her off as to when Landau was out of the hotel, so that she could get in and out without encountering the woman.”

  “We had a case like that a couple of years back,” Ray said. “Big midtown hotel, an’ we started gettin’ reports of things missin’ from the rooms. No signs of forced entry, and it was almost always cash that was taken, an’ another thing—the victims were almost always Japanese businessmen.”

  “At some midtown hotels,” Erica said, “that’s just about all you find.”

  “This one got a lot of ’em,” Ray said, “but it was still pretty clear they were gettin’ targeted. An’ we looked into it, an’ we found it was worse than we figured, because a lot of the Japs was gettin’ knocked off an’ not botherin�
� to report it. We knew it had to be somebody on the inside, an’ we narrowed it down to this one clerk, but we couldn’t make a case.”

  “What happened?”

  “You tell me. There was this one Jap we talked to. He got knocked off, an’ he knew some other people who got knocked off, an’ I guess maybe we let on which clerk we suspected.” He looked off into the distance, recalling the moment. “Funny guy,” he said. “Woulda made a hell of a poker player, ’cause he didn’t show nothin’ in his face. An’ when he stretched out his arms you could see he had tattoos on his wrists, an’ there was more tattooin’ that showed when he loosened his tie an’ unbuttoned his collar. An’ one more thing that was pretty funny. I mean, he was the kind of guy that if he was an American you’d figure him to have a pinkie ring. But there was no way in hell he could manage that.”

  Somebody obligingly asked why.

  “No place to put it,” Ray said. “Both his pinkies were gone. Funny, huh?”

  “Yakuza,” I said. “Japanese gangsters. What happened to the clerk?”

  “Well, must be he took the money an’ ran,” Ray said, “because he disappeared, an’ nobody ever saw him again.” He shrugged. “But just to be on the safe side, I stayed outta sushi bars for the next month or so.”

  Carl had the look of someone who’d eaten a little too much Uzbek food. I guess he didn’t like stories where the hotel clerk disappeared.

  “Maybe you’d worked a deal with her before,” I said to Carl. “For one reason or another she knew you weren’t an altar boy, and she made her pitch and you liked the sound of it. As a matter of fact, you had an idea of your own.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “People say that all the time,” I said, “and it’s hardly ever true. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You told her about a woman living right here at the Paddington, a fellow member of the theatrical profession, who was wearing an extremely valuable necklace with matching earrings.”

  Isis’s jaw dropped, and she wheeled on Carl. “You son of a bitch,” she said. “I thought we were friends.”

  “Don’t believe him, Isis.”